I was going through the list of CIDR papers this year and looking for ones that were relevant to my interests. If you're not familiar with CIDR as an institution, it's basically the "short, kind of kooky" database papers conference. You're more likely to find things that are a little looser, a little more speculative, a little more off the wall, and a little more self-contained. I enjoyed On the Vexing Difficulty of Evaluating IN Predicates , which is relevant to my interests as far as "surpr...

Visited Palmanova plenty of times in my life but never paid attention the writings at the center of main square. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs Visited Palmanova plenty of times in my life but never paid attention the writings at the center of main square. Thank yo...

Announcement: Before we begin the article, I’m thrilled to share that apart from running my flagship  Moon Monday blog+newsletter, I’m continuing with the Open Lunar Foundation  and its nice team for another year to help communicate the non-profit’s  research work of forging technical and policy building blocks for cooperative and peaceful lunar exploration globally. It’s a mission that aligns extremely well with the ethos of Moon Monday. 🌙 Disclaimer for transparency:  ...

Originally, I was drafting this in September, planning on dedicating it to Windows 10 Home becoming EOL. I also figured I’d share a meme that contained something along the following: Instead, however, it’s early 2026, and I feel like a dedication to RAM prices would be a more fitting start: Memes aside, the lightweight laptop - what I’m typing this post on - has a whopping total of 2 GB of ram (1. Originally, I was drafting this in September, planning on dedicating it to Windows 10 Home ...

Vertical boring machine, via Industrial History . Welcome to the Reading List, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Some housekeeping items: Continuing with the new reading list format this week, this time with a paywall ~1/3rd of the way down. I got some feedback that folks liked a little more analysis, so I’ve expanded that a bit more. As a reminder, this is intended to be a little bit more comprehensive than the older format, a...

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you will have noticed this week that a project of my friend Peter went viral on the internet . It went by many names. The most recent one is OpenClaw but in the news you might have encountered it as ClawdBot or MoltBot depending on when you read about it. It is an agent connected to a communication channel of your choice that just runs code . What you might be less familiar with is that what’s under the hood of OpenClaw is a little coding agent...

Recently this post from @Merocle caught my eye: I'm fixing my iFixit soldering station. I haven't used it for a long time and the battery has gone overdischarge. I hope it will come back to life. Unfortunately, there are no replacements available for sale at the moment. Devices with built-in rechargeable batteries have been bugging me a lot lately. It's convenient to have a device you can take with you and use anywhere. And with modern Li-ion cells, battery life is remarkable. Re...

I'm increasingly seeing a lot of technical and business writing make heavy use of bold font weights, in an attempt to emphasize what the writers think is important. LLMs seem to have picked up and spread this practice widely. But most of this is self-defeating, the more a writer uses typographical emphasis, the less power it has, quickly reaching the point where it loses all its benefits. There are various typographical tools that are used to emphasize words and phrases, such as: ...

In early 2007, René Hudec was in Building D of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, thumbing through roomfuls of floor-to-ceiling cabinets that look more like a vast record collection than an academic archive. Each paper sleeve holds a glass plate, most of which are 8 by 10 inches, a historic photographic record of the cosmos from before the age of sophisticated digital detectors. Source In early 2007, René Hudec was in Building D of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysi...

I am hosting the IndieWeb Book Club for this month, in which everyone interested is invited to read and write a blog post about The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence [ Goodreads link ]. The book was authored by Ros Atkins, a BBC journalist whose career has spanned radio on the BBC World Service and television on BBC News. I read this book toward the end of last year and loved that the advice given was tactical, engaging, and interspersed with stories. I’d h...

It’s February! This means I have been at the JKU for four months. Four months with teaching Compiler Construction and System Software , lots of new responsibilities (most notably signing off on telephone bills and coffee orders…), many new colleagues, and new things to learn for me, not least because of the very motivated students and PhD students here. And when I say motivated, yes, I am very surprised. While the attendance of my 8:30am Compiler Construction lectures was declining thro...

Software stocks had a brutal start to 2026. Bloomberg called it “‘No Reasons to Own’” — and the data backs that up. Morgan Stanley’s SaaS basket has lagged the Nasdaq 100 by ~40 percentage points since December 2024. HubSpot and Klaviyo? Both down roughly 30% this month alone. Reuters reports that AI disruption fears are driving a sector-wide selloff while semiconductors and memory stocks benefit from the same AI trade. The market is pricing in extinction for traditional Sa...

Most of us think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, but we are actually feeling creatures that think. ― Jill Bolte Taylor If you’re not feeling as good about life as you want to be, that’s okay. If you feel stressed about a lot of things, that’s okay. If you get nervous, that’s okay. If you feel overwhelmed, that’s okay. If you freak out and yell, that’s okay. If you break down and cry, that’s okay. If the uncertainty of every little thing is panic-indu...

The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot , renamed to OpenClaw . It's an open source implementation of the digital personal assistant pattern, built by Peter Steinberger to integrate with the messaging system of your choice. It's two months old, has over 114,000 stars on GitHub and is seeing incredible adoption, especially given the friction involved in setting it up. (Given the inherent risk of prompt injection against this class of software it's my current pi...

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.” ― The Lord of the Rings Last year, I made a decision to take a five-month sabbatical (an extended leave from work). Tomorrow, my journey will finally begin! 🌴 I mostly want to travel the world, but I will also focus on self-discovery and pushing my personal limits. Route My goal is not to visit all the touris...

MUMBAI, India (January 28, 2026)  — Shield AI, the deep-tech company building state-of-the-art autonomy software products and defence aircraft, today announced that India has selected Shield AI to supply V-BATs to the Indian Army. Under the program, the Indian Army will receive V-BATs and licenses for Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software, which will be integrated into the V-BAT platform.   In addition to the procurement of V-BAT aircraft, the deal includes the licens...

Given any string of bytes, you can convert it to an hexadecimal string by mapping the least significant and the most significant 4 bits of byte to characters in 01...9A...F . There are more efficient techniques like base64, that map 3 bytes to 4 characters. However, hexadecimal outputs are easier to understand and often sufficiently concise. A simple function to do the conversion using a short lookup table is as follows: static const char hex [] = "0123456789abcdef" ; for ( ...

I've been thinking about how this site may be able to live on after I'm gone. Maybe it could become a family heirloom? I’ve thought about this topic more generally before , but this one is specifically about blogging. This blog is by far the hobby I have sunk the most time into over the last 13-ish years, and I’d like to think I’ll continue as I head from middle age, to old age. Let’s say I live until I’m 80, I will have spent over 50 years of my time on this earth writing con...

I now see how it can be addictive: A mindblowing experience and feeling like I see the world a bit differently. A feeling of being super smart and powerful. Getting lured in with free samples then everything costs. How it grabs my attention when using it, and then when I am not using it, I yearn to get back in. Is it productive to think of generative AI as a new drug? I have been thinking of a project in the decentralized web arena and trying to find someone to hire or inspire to tr...

Lance and I had a blog-debate about  What to do about students using ChatGPT to do their Homework . Some commenters pointed out that we've been here before. I will now list past technologies that looked like they were a problem for student assignments and ponder what happened.  If students can consult diagrams in their text then they will lose the ability to I DON"T KNOW AND I DON"T CARE . I did a post about this  titled  In the 1960's students protested the Vietnam war!/In 1830 students pr...

I write a lot of Makefiles . I use it not as a command runner but as an ad-hoc build system for small projects, typically for compiling Markdown documents and their dependencies. Like so: And the above graph was generated by this very simple Makefile: graph.png : graph.dot dot -Tpng $< -o $@ clean : rm -f graph.png (I could never remember the automatic variable syntax until I made flashcards for them.) It works for simple project...

In my YouTube channel, for some time now I started to refer to the process of writing software using AI assistance (soon to become just "the process of writing software", I believe) with the term "Automatic Programming". In case you didn't notice, automatic programming produces vastly different results with the same LLMs depending on the human that is guiding the process with their intuition, design, continuous steering and idea of software. Please, stop saying "Claude vibe coded this soft...